Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas wrote at industrial scale, with a workshop behind him, and the most important member of it was Auguste Maquet, who drafted plots and researched the novels that went out under Dumas's name alone. Twenty Years After (1845) and Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (1847 to 1850), the second and third d'Artagnan books, came from that partnership, as did The Count of Monte Cristo, serialised from 1844. Beside them sit The Corsican Brothers (1844), about twins who feel each other's injuries across France, and The Black Tulip (1850), set in the Dutch Republic of 1672 around a contest to breed a black bloom. Celebrated Crimes, written between 1839 and 1841, is an eighteen-part collection of historical cases; Ali Pacha, Joan of Naples and The Borgias are chapters of it, issued separately. From Absinthe to Zest draws on Le Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine, the culinary encyclopedia he finished just before his death and which appeared in 1873; the English selection is by Alan and Jane Davidson. His father Thomas-Alexandre, son of an enslaved woman in Saint-Domingue, rose to general in the French revolutionary armies. Dumas died in 1870, and in 2002 his remains were moved to the Panthéon.